The use of not only wired Internet services but also various wireless Internet services using mobile communication terminals such as mobile phones or PDAs have been significantly increased along with the development of Internet technologies. The development of wireless Internet technologies is realizing a ubiquitous environment in which users can freely access networks anywhere and anytime. An example technology for realizing such a ubiquitous environment is a Location Based Service (LBS)-related technology which has been intensively developed along with the development of wireless Internet and mobile computing technologies. The LBS has been used in various situations and various applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for providing vicinity information, criminal or emergency signals, and SOS. To use the LBS, it is necessary to locate wireless communication terminals. Technologies used for locating terminals using wireless communication are divided into a location technology based on base stations and a location technology based on GPS satellites. A combination of the base-station-based and GPS-satellite-based location technologies has also been used recently. To locate terminals based on base stations, terminals register their current location information in a Home Location Register (HLR). The mobile communication network can determine a base station whose range includes a mobile terminal such as a mobile phone or a PDA since its current location information registered in the HLR includes identification information of the base station which is currently responsible for wireless communication with the mobile terminal. The GPS-based location method determines the current location of a mobile phone or the like using GPS signals received from 24 GPS satellites that orbit the Earth. The GPS-based location method generally uses triangulation. When the counterpart requests transmission of location information from a terminal such as a mobile phone in order to locate the terminal, the terminal marks the current location of the terminal determined using GPS signals on a map. Specifically, the terminal retrieves map information from a database in the terminal or from a separate server and marks the current location of the terminal on the map information and transmits the map information marked with the current location to the counterpart.
However, this conventional method has the following problems. A very large amount of data is transmitted and received since the user terminal transmits the map marked with the current location to the counterpart.
The counterpart cannot directly mark places associated with the location of the user terminal (for example, places which the user of the user terminal frequently visits) on the map since the counterpart only passively confirms the location of the user terminal received from the user terminal.
When the user of the user terminal desires to transmit video or audio information of ambient environments or the like of the user terminal in addition to the current location of the user terminal, it is necessary to transmit information a number of times since the user terminal cannot transmit the video or audio information together with the location information.